I can't believe they went that way with hand crossbows.
...or the short lived humans...Just as plausible as the dwarven craftsman.Don't you think a long lived race like drow could construct a highly effective hand crossbow capable of fairly rapid use?
That's very much a two-handed weapon. It's not comparable to the single-handed firing of a hand crossbow, nor the power and range of the light and heavy crossbows described in the PHB.
That's not the point: the science & engineering behind making a repeating crossbow was fully understood by humans who only lived 1/10th of the span of a Dwarf or 1/22th the life of an Elf. IOW, extraordinary longevity is NOT requried.That's very much a two-handed weapon. It's not comparable to the single-handed firing of a hand crossbow, nor the power and range of the light and heavy crossbows described in the PHB.
That's not the point: the science & engineering behind making a repeating crossbow was fully understood by humans who only lived 1/10th of the span of a Dwarf or 1/22th the life of an Elf. IOW, extraordinary longevity is NOT requried.
Scaling it down to a hand held size and making it operate one-handed would have been merely a matter of time, but the events post Boxer Rebellion and the increasing efficacy of black powder weaponry basically rendered that line of research unimportant.
...but it didn't kill it. A while back, I was reading on a weapons forum about members looking for one of their number who had worked out a rope system that allowed him to fire & cock a repeating crossbow one handed. As of my reading, they hadn't found him, but in my mind, I can see the cocking mechanism operating by flexing and straightening the arm.
So again, longevity isn't a prereq, just an inquisitive mind.
Your arm-powered cocking mechanism sounds awkward and unreliable. In other words, gnomish.
I wouldn't interpret the word "when" to imply any kind of causality or as necessitating a particular order of events. To me, it means "at the time", which would imply you can take the bonus action on the same turn as you take the attack action. I don't think it matters what order you do it in. It seems to me that all that's required is you have a free hand when you take the bonus action so you can reload. And remember we're not talking about two-weapon fighting here. You can't use a hand crossbow in two-weapon fighting because it's not a melee weapon.
I'm not sure if this is in direct response to my post. If you read it again you'll see that I accounted for the crossbow being loaded before the bonus attack occurrs, as in the statement "fire and load", meaning to fire an already loaded crossbow and then reload it as per Crawford's clarification of the ammunition property.
You can't just look at half of the realism equation.I'm not a crossbow expert myself, but I'm pretty sure that this is not at all realistic or (at least for my game) reasonable. Crossbows aren't easy and quick to cock; that's why they used to have a fire rate of 1 every other round.
D20 would of course make the weapon fearsome.They wouldn't be worthless if the hit were sufficiently devastating, but no edition of D&D has given heavy crossbows that punch.
ROF 1/2, damage 1d20 might be a reasonable tradeoff. Or possibly 1d10 damage and an armor-piercing mechanic (e.g. ignores piercing resistance, +2 to hit vs heavy armor...)